Weather and Traffic

Coast Guard reports tar balls in Key West

Tar balls up to eight inches in diameter are washing up in the Lower Keys, the U.S. Coast Guard reports. As of late Monday, 20 tar balls were found on the beach at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park in Key West and the nearby Navy beach at Truman Annex.

Tar balls were also found on Smathers Beach, Big Pine Key and Loggerhead Key in the Dry Tortugas. They were being shipped to a laboratory for analysis. It’s not clear whether or not they originated from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Tar balls were being recovered at the rate of three per hour with the heaviest concentration at high tide, the Coast Guard said. Government agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuaries, were sweeping beaches with a Coast Guard Helicopter on Tuesday morning.

“It now appears likely that the first Florida beaches to see oil from the spill will be in the Lower Florida Keys, not in the Panhandle,” Masters said.

He said a NASA satellite image showed that a tongue of the oil had spread southeast into the northern-most edge of the Loop. The water feeds into the Florida Current south of the Keys, then up the East Coast as the Gulf Stream. The current moves at about 5 mph.

Masters cited a study of overall Gulf currents indicating that Florida’s west coast is in little danger. “This study implies that the greatest risk of land impacts by surface oil caught in the Loop Current is along the ocean side of the Florida Keys, and along the coast of Southeast Florida from Miami to West Palm Beach.”

In Palm Beach, Emergency Management Coordinator Mike Galvin said he’ll be meeting with a task force consisting of federal, state and local officials at the Port of Palm Beach on Monday.

“We’ll have to see whether we start getting the tar balls,” he said Tuesday. “If we do, the best thing will probably be to just scrape them off the beach.

“We’re in a monitoring phase,” Galvin added. “There’s zip we can do about it right now.”

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The National Hurricane Center has published an online guide to the 2010 hurricane season. It’s part of the NHC’s Hurricane Preparedness Week, May 23-29,

It contains a section on hurricane history, starting with the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, winding through the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928 that slammed Palm Beach and killed 1,836 in the Glades, and ending with Hurricane Wilma’s ravaging of South Florida in 2005.

When you take a close look at the maps you get an idea of just how vulnerable the Florida peninsula really is during tropical weather season.

There are also detailed sections on hurricane hazards – storm surge, wind and inland flooding – a narrative on how forecasts are prepared, and how to develop a safety plan.

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Palm Beach International Airport received a half-inch of rain yesterday – but that still leaves us an inch and a half below average for month.

Showers and thunderstorms are in the afternoon forecast for the rest of the week, as high temperatures creep up toward 90. Summer weather has arrived.